Today, Brother Leader Muammar Qaddafi packs up the tent in the gardens of the Hotel Marigny, the official guest residence next to the Elysee Palace, and ends his five-day stay in the City of Lights. The visit was too much, even for the French. Said Manuel Valls, a veteran socialist: “I have the impression that France has been humiliated.”
Make that humiliated and criticized. Nobody seems to be defending the French government of Nicolas Sarkozy for inviting the Libyan strongman. The erratic autocrat has managed to outrage just about everybody on his first official visit to a Western state since 2003, when he renounced terrorism and nuclear weapons. Controversy has followed almost every one of his outlandish and insulting comments on a wide range of topics, but the larger issue is the West’s engagement of reforming tyrants. Qaddafi is now considered “a socially acceptable dictator.”
But Qaddafi remains a dictator nonetheless, and that has caused heartburn for the center-right French government. President Sarkozy has been on the defensive about his warm welcome for the charismatic, mercurial, and despotic Libyan, who came with 400 followers and his contingent of female bodyguards in desert fatigues. In his best reply to critics, the French leader asked, “If we don’t welcome those who take the road to respectability, then what do we say to those who take the opposite road?”
Sarko, of course, has a point and Qaddafi may theoretically have a “right to redemption,” but it is the nature of France’s engagement that has been wrong. “It’s a question of balance, and in this case, the balance wasn’t right,” said Dominique Moisi, director of the French Institute on International Relations. Even some ministers in the French government have thought their president has gone too far in pandering to the “Supreme Guide of the Revolution.” Unfortunately, the Libyan, with petrodollars to spend, has been able to bend the normally clear-thinking leader of France. “Qaddafi is not perceived as a dictator in the Arab world,” Sarkozy told a French magazine on Wednesday. “He is the longest serving head of state in the region, and in the Arab world, that counts.”
What really counts is that Western leaders speak plainly. It’s all right to deal with autocrats from time-to-time, but we need to make sure that we do not legitimize them and create incentives for regressive behavior. As it happens, in the glow of his pomped-up stay, Qaddafi felt comfortable enough in, among other things, turning back the clock and repeating his denials that his government has never sponsored terrorism. This step in the wrong direction shows that Sarkozy has not found the right way to keep the Libyan on the right road.
Love the title. There’s a great Churchill quote on the floor of the parliament when he was speaking to Chamberlain. It’s goes like this: You had the choice between war (WW2) and dishonor, you choose dishonor, now you will get war.
This Western crusade against Hamas is nonetheless a Jewish war for Abu Mazen’s restoration, Kadima’s re-election and Fatah sovereignty over Judaea-Samaria and the Old City. The poison pill is eagerly swallowed.
There is no genuine downside for Israel in this – the people condemning them over Gaza are people who reflexively condemn them in all situations. Why listen to them? They’re little different than the Palestinians, who are Jewish-eliminationists.
The specter of a nuclear war, and the legacy of our “limited objectives” fiasco in Vietnam, confused a lot of Americans as to the efficacy of war for achieving, as military writer B.H. Liddell-Hart put it, a “better peace.”
It’s not particularly insightful to recognize that military victory can change political conditions for the better. There was a time when that concept was simply axiomatic for Americans. You didn’t go to war UNLESS you wanted to change political conditions for the better — by means of WAR.
But pungent commentators like Luttwak have to remind us of this mindset now, because of the twin apparitions that stalked us during the Cold War. Under their influence, we talked ourselves out of seeing military operations as efficacious, or truly decisive political objectives as even possible.
The political animus against this concept is still powerful, as we see with the ongoing effort by the media and left-wing politicians to make us believe that political conditions have not actually been changed in Iraq, or at least not for the better — by either the original removal of Saddam, or the surge strategy. It takes a whole heap of self-deception to keep that narrative going, but the motivation is clearly there, for deniers of the obvious.
It’s actually a luxury, available to very few peoples in the history of mankind, to imagine that there is no condition so bad that war is the only thing that can improve it. Of course war can improve bad conditions, and of course there are conditions that bad. War has frequently redressed them. The cost is high. But only those outside the situations, and unaffected by them, can be so obtuse as to think the cost of war is ALWAYS “too high,” or that it can never achieve an objective worth the cost.
The Jews have gone crazy
Opps, some one miscalculated on this one! And guess what, Fatah is not coming to rescue Hamas.
This is certainly true, and there is no doubt that Israel is trying to minimize civilian causalities. But the important thing to realize (if you accept the premises that the number of civilian casualties must not exceed the number of civilian lives ultimately saved, and that Palestinian lives are morally equivalent to Israeli lives) is that very, very few Israelis have died from Hamas rocket fire. The Israeli government surely knew that its actions would result in the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians — that Hamas likes to hide behind them doesn’t mean that Hamas is responsible for their deaths. If an attack on Gaza kills 500 Palestinian civilians in three weeks but saves 5 Israeli lives over the next year, can the attack really be called moral? If its goal were to topple the Hamas government (which would probably save more lives than it took), then perhaps it could be, but as matters stand I think it is a serious moral mistake to support the Israeli attack.
Israel Palestine 1947 to present
Andrew Sullivan posted this map, presumably to show how the Israelis are presuring Palestinians. Of course, what he leaves out is that Palestinians tried to destroy Israel in 1947 and 48, tried to do it again in 1967 (although Israel attacked first when it appeared the Nassar and Syrian armies were about to move), Egypt attacked in 1973. Some argue no settlements should have occurred in occupied Gaza, Jerusalem, Golan Heights, and the West Bank, but given the hostility of her neighbors, Israel has in fact been restrained.
Yes, do support the ground war. Even if “Hopefully, the vote was a result of a U.S.-Israeli deal: the U.S. would allow the passage of a largely meaningless resolution in order to front-load the mollification of international peace-processors, knowing that Israel would ignore it; and in later phases, the U.S. will step forward to provide diplomatic support should the need arise” was the US strategy in abstaining from UN vote, it will encourage the growing demands for stopping the ground war. Already the Wash. Post editorial (1/10) discussing the pros and cons, ends with “The Bush administration, which so far has done little more than support Israel’s decisions throughout this crisis, should now be pressing it to settle.”
Ari…would you agree that with each Hamas missile, the Jihadists intend to kill more than a limited number of Israelis? That’s the only sensible conclusion, given that their charter calls for obliterating Israel. Therefore, your defense of the disproportinate argument is ridiculous. Also, the fact that you absolve Hamas for the deaths of civilians behind whom they hide is morally offensive and lacks common sense. Imagine you were walking peacefully down the street and a criminal who was running from the scene of a crime grabbed you and held you hostage. The police came to capture the criminal and, sadly, shot you. The law is clear that the police are not to blame. Only one party is guilty of war crimes when it comes to the situation in Gaza: the ruthless Jihadists who use innocents as human shields.
Ari said, “….that Hamas likes to hide behind them doesn’t mean that Hamas is responsible for their deaths.”
Actually in international law, Hamas IS responsible while Israel is not responsible for deaths of these human shields.
Over the last hundred years, rules have been developed to regulate armed conflicts between nation states, to minimise the deaths of non-combatants as well as provide fair treatment to captured enemy combatants. These rules were based on traditional rules of waging warfare and treatment of prisoners.
Without such laws, hostages and human shields would be permissible, as would scorched earth policies in captured territory. While these sorts of events still happen, contrary to international law, the fact that they are not customary to every conflict is an indication of the general success of these laws.
So, we have a group of people, non-combatants, called Protected Persons who are not taking direct part in military operations. These protected people and protected places such as hospitals are not supposed to be targeted by international law. Because of their immunity to attack, they would make excellent shields for combatants. Thus the rules for warfare waive the protection from normally protected people and places to prevent them being used as shields when they are being used as shields.
The intent is that by removing their usefulness as shields, then they will therefore not be used as shields and thus safer from the conflict. So, civilians, children, hospitals, and ambulances are protected except when being used by either side as shields or cover for military forces. When they are being used as cover, they lose their protected person or protected place status and no crime has been committed if they are damaged or injured as a result of incidental injury where the military forces hiding amongst them are targeted. If an enemy team commandeers a ambulance, then that ambulance and possible civilian occupants lose their protected status and the ambulance becomes a legitimate target. By being a legitimate target, international law attempts to dissuade the use of that ambulance as a shield and thus minimise the risk to non-combatants.
Contrary to current popular usage, the concept of Proportionality of Force, as agreed on in international law does not relate to equal damage or deaths on both sides. The Proportionality of Force says that one side can use enough force to achieve its military goals, but not overly excess of that necessary to achieve its military goals. This means that you can kill hundreds or thousands of enemy even if you suffer no casualties at all, as long as you are achieving a military goal – genocide not being a legitimate military goal. It also means that if protected persons on one side are being killed illegally, there is not an allowance for the equivalent number of protected persons on the other side are allowed to be killed illegally: this notion of proportionality is not a tit for tat allowance.
In a civilised country you will be arrested and punished for shooting over the fence at your neighbour’s family, even though you haven’t yet hit anyone. Where dealing with countries, where there is no higher authority that can or will enforce a permanent cessation of one country firing over the border to another country, the targeted country is permitted to act in self defense to stop the shooting. There is no requirement in international law that casualties on both sides must be equal.